Barnes & Noble Battles Amazon’s Fire With $199 Nook

Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch holds up the Nook Tablet last November when it was released. The company unveiled Tuesday a lower-priced Nook.

The bookstore chain unveiled a $199 version of its Nook tablet Tuesday morning, matching the price for Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle Fire. The new Nook tablet will have 8 gigabytes of built-in memory, the same as the Kindle Fire.

Both the Nook tablet and the Kindle Fire came out last November. But the Nook tablet came with 16 GB of memory and was priced $50 higher than the Kindle Fire.

Barnes & Noble also said it was cutting the price on the Nook Color e-reader to $169, $30 lower than its existing price. It follows a price cut from $249 announced when the Nook tablet was unveiled.

Barnes & Noble announced the new device as it released third-quarter quarterly earnings. The retailer said Nook unit sales, including e-readers like the Nook Simple Touch and Nook Color, rose 64% compared with the year-earlier quarter while digital content sales — including ebooks and digital magazines — rose 85%.